The Student Movement and the Rediscovery of Theory
This text is a preview of History of the Reception of Hegel, volume II, to be published in 2026 by Reflexivity Press.
The Hunger for Theory
The student movement is not a homogeneous movement but a constellation of very different groups: the civil rights movement and Black Power in the United States, Situationists and Maoists in France, the SDS and communards in Germany, Provo in the Netherlands. But one trait connects them: the hunger for theory.[1]
This is paradoxical. The 1950s had been hostile to theory—pragmatism in the West, dogmatism in the East, practice in the Third World. Theory was considered an “ivory tower,” unworldly, reactionary. But 1968 reverses this: no revolution without theory. The movement devours books—Marx’s Capital, Lukács’s History and Class Consciousness, Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man, Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle.[2]
The University Crisis as Structural Background
The student revolt has material causes: the universities are overcrowded. The educational expansion of the 1950s and '60s multiplied student numbers, but the structures remained the same—authoritarian professors, lecture-hall teaching, no co-determination. The universities have become factories producing academic labor, not sites of critical thought.[3]
The structural problem: universities are supposed to fulfill two functions—on one hand critical reflection (Humboldt’s ideal of education/Bildung), on the other hand training for the labor market. These functions come into contradiction. The students want education; the state wants a workforce. The revolt is directed against this instrumentalization—universities should not be service providers for industry but sites of critique.
The Hegel connection: the students unconsciously demand what Hegel called Bildung—not training (adaptation to what exists) but alienation as a path to independence. For Hegel, Bildung means: distancing oneself from the immediate, passing through the other, and thereby becoming a self-conscious subject. The university crisis shows that the system no longer produces Bildung, only qualification.
The Frankfurt School as Bridge to Hegel
In Germany, this hunger for theory leads to a renaissance of the Frankfurt School—and thereby to Hegel. The connection is not direct (the students do not read Hegel’s Logic) but mediated: they read Adorno, Horkheimer, Marcuse—and these read Hegel.
Adorno’s position: ambivalent. On one hand he criticizes Hegel (identity-thinking, systemic compulsion, affirmation). On the other hand he uses Hegel’s method (dialectics, immanent critique, negation). The students in the Frankfurt lecture hall (the lecture course “Introduction to Dialectics,” 1958/59, published only in 2010) hear: Hegel is critical if one reads him against himself.[4]
Marcuse’s position: more affirmative. Reason and Revolution (1941, German translation 1962) rehabilitates Hegel as a thinker of negativity. Hegel shows that the existing order is not rational as long as it contains unfreedom. This is not conservative affirmation but revolutionary critique: what is, is not rational—therefore it must be changed.[5]
The consequence: Hegel is repurposed. No longer the thinker of reconciliation (as with Ritter), but the thinker of permanent critique. Not “absolute knowledge” (closure), but determinate negation (driving forward). Hegel becomes the theorist of revolution—against his own conservative implications.
The Failure of Mediation – Adorno and the Students
But this appropriation of Hegel fails in practice. In January 1969, students occupy Adorno’s Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt. Adorno calls the police. The scene is symbolic: theory and practice fall apart. Adorno, who taught dialectics, cannot live it. The students, who want revolution, lose patience with theory.[6]
Adorno dies in August 1969—exhausted, disillusioned. His last work, Negative Dialectics (1966), shows the dilemma: how can one think dialectically without arriving at synthesis? How can one criticize without affirming? Adorno’s answer: preserve non-identity, endure contradictions, refuse reconciliation.[7]
The systematic question: is this still Hegel—or already his dissolution? Adorno claims: this is Hegel, read against Hegel. But postmodernism will say: this is already post-Hegel—a dialectic that abandons its own principles.
On the history of the student movement see Gerd-Rainer Horn: The Spirit of '68 (2007); Martin Klimke & Joachim Scharloth (eds.): 1968 in Europe: A History of Protest and Activism (2008). ↩︎
On the texts read see Wolfgang Kraushaar: 1968 als Mythos, Chiffre und Zäsur (2000). ↩︎
On the university crisis see Jürgen Habermas: “Die Scheinrevolution und ihre Kinder” (1968) in: id.: Protestbewegung und Hochschulreform (1969). ↩︎
Theodor W. Adorno: Einführung in die Dialektik (lecture 1958/59, published 2010). ↩︎
Herbert Marcuse: Reason and Revolution (1941, German 1962). ↩︎
On the occupation of the institute see Wolfgang Kraushaar: “Die Protestchronik 1949-1959” in: id. (ed.): Frankfurter Schule und Studentenbewegung (1998). ↩︎
Theodor W. Adorno: Negative Dialectics (1966). ↩︎